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Eye candy: Epic’s ProtoStar Vulkan graphics demo

Epic Games has provided a glimpse of the graphical quality we can expect from mobile titles in the future with ProtoStar, a real-time demo designed to showcase the capabilities of the new Vulkan graphics API.

The demo, which was created in Unreal Engine, is designed to run on Samsung’s new Galaxy S7 smartphone.

More on-screen objects, more render effects
One of the selling points of Vulkan is improved GPU compute capabilities, particularly on mobile devices. In crude terms, that means more draw calls – and therefore more dynamic objects on screen at any time.

In ProtoStar, that means thousands of objects on screen: first water droplets, then chunks of molten rock that coalesce and fragment, eventually forming the rings of a new planet.

But it also means a number of more subtle rendering improvements, including dynamic planar reflections, temporal anti-aliasing, chromatic aberration and tonemapping.

Epic has a blog post listing all of the demo’s other technical firsts, which you can find via the link below. Or if you just want two minutes of eye candy, hit play on the video above.